The following article, written by Lilla Gollob, was published on Építészfórum’s online platform at the time of the project’s first publication in Hungary.
The concrete bench, designed by BIVAK Studio and suspended within a steel frame, expresses the principle of ‘heavy lightness’ through its materiality and formal language. The project was realized through broad professional and civic collaboration, supported by community funding.
Marcel Breuer (1902, Pécs – 1981, New York) was a world-renowned architect and furniture designer, a former professor at Harvard University, who emigrated from Europe to the United States, where he became a key figure of American modernism. In his hometown of Pécs, a public memorial bench designed by BIVAK Studio was inaugurated in tribute to his life and work. The functional artwork was realized through broad professional and civic collaboration, supported by community funding, and seeks to contribute—along Breuer’s legacy—to the initiation of a cultural dialogue between Pécs and New York.
The design of the memorial bench received recognition in 2023 through an open competition announced by the South Transdanubian Chamber of Architects, originally calling for proposals for a public memorial column, and was completed in 2025. Architects Tamás Máté and Áron Vass-Eysen of BIVAK Studio designed a piece of street furniture that reflects Marcel Breuer’s design principles both in function and formal language. Rather than serving as a conventional monument, the work integrates into the urban fabric of Pécs as an actively used public element, located along the Marcel Breuer Promenade—an important section of the city’s cultural axis developed as part of the Pécs 2010 European Capital of Culture program.
The materiality and formal language of the concrete bench suspended within a steel frame express the principle of ‘heavy lightness,’ as articulated by Barry Bergdoll—one of the most prominent scholars of Marcel Breuer’s oeuvre, professor at Columbia University, and member of the Pritzker Prize jury—in his 2023 Budapest lecture titled Marcel Breuer and the Invention of Heavy Lightness. This concept had a significant influence on BIVAK Studio’s competition design.
The paving slabs of the bench feature line drawings and factual references to Marcel Breuer’s most significant objects and buildings, offering an interpretative framework for his oeuvre. They include his iconic tubular steel furniture designs—among them the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair—which fundamentally reshaped twentieth-century design culture. These works were conceived in Germany at the Bauhaus, where Breuer was first a student and later a teacher. The paving slabs also present key architectural projects from his post-emigration period, marking his shift from modernism toward brutalism, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1966) and the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1958).